Ask Emma: Is Sex Necessary?

I have a patient I’ll call Mark. He’s been coming for about five years. He is single, in his 30s, fastidious, a bit depressed. He is very funny.

“Umm, I thought this was supposed to be about me, isn’t it?” he’ll say if I digress for a moment into my own reflections. “I don’t pay to listen to your problems.”

We laugh. We also play this little game. He doesn’t say anything — at all — about sexual desire, or romantic love, of any kind. He never talks about longing for a woman or a man. And since he never brings it up, I don’t ask.

We know we are doing this. This is our version of romance within the bonds of therapy. I want something from him. He knows I want it, but withholds it from me. He is depriving me of the satisfaction.

Then there is Constance. Constance has about nine dogs. She is a medical doctor, performing at the highest levels. She also happens to be a virgin.

But Constance, unlike Mark, does talk about romantic longing. She looks online for the perfect man. “It’s like homework,” she says, miserable. “It’s so much work. I just want someone to come along and make it simple.”

Every now and then Constance does go out with someone she meets online, but she unconsciously dooms the date from the start. She literally schedules them for 4:30 in the afternoon, somewhere bright and crowded, between shifts at the hospital.

“So, what was he like,” I’ll ask after one of these dates.

“The same. I don’t remember. They’re all the same,” she’ll say.

What we have here are two people who would simply prefer not to — I mean, they just don’t want, in their hearts, to get sucked into the maelstrom of sex and relationship. I suspect Mark has fantasies he doesn’t want me to know about, and that’s certainly his right. If he doesn’t want to bring sex and intimacy into his life, isn’t that OK? Constance has dreams of being swept away by a knight on a horse to a magic land where everything will be better, But the mess involved — the literal mess: fluids, the touching, the body-on-body dimension — repels her. Dating is work, and I suspect that if she didn’t feel social pressure to “date” and “marry” and be “normal” she would drop it immediately and get another dog.

And I want to say that this is all right. Sex isn’t for everyone.

But somehow that doesn’t quite work out well for people, because there is something about the sex drive that seems to insist upon finding an expression. As you are probably aware, the wonder of the Internet was driven in part by the need for greater bandwidth to feed the insatiable desire for more, better, faster pornography. Recently, a study of preferred porn search words by geography was published. You can find it for yourself — let’s just say, Kentucky and Romania, what is going on there?

Not everyone has the same level of drive or enjoys sex that much. But the denial of the sexual impulse altogether does seem to create unpleasant side effects. Some, for instance, become immersed in pornography and online chat rooms to the exclusion of human encounters and so on. The real danger is the split in the ego — where one half of the person can’t integrate the sexual self and splits it off. That’s where you get perversions of various kinds — the molestation of children, voyeurism, and so on. The impulse finds an outlet without the governance of reason, because sex is “bad” and therefore can’t be part of the integrated self. It needs to happen in a dark, secret place.

But that’s not what troubles me today. When I look at Mark and Constance, I see people who have not acquired a certain ease in their bodies. They aren’t at home in themselves. They are — and feel — cut off from the essential human experience, which is to be a bodied, incarnate, messy, fluid emanating, sexual creature. To have this aspect of our nature met and accepted by another person is a very deep need. For a moment, we are OK — interpenetrated — with another person and it confirms us as being part of the human family, alive for a moment, aware of our finitude.

That’s why sex is necessary. Sex, even bad sex, has a way of throwing us into the river of the living.

Emma Tennant (not her real name) is a practicing psychotherapist. All advice offered here is simply that. If you have a pressing concern, you should see a specialist in person. If you have a question you’d like addressed or a comment for Emma, send it to askemma@timesunion.com. Inquiries will be treated with confidentiality.